C. Box - Savage Run

He had no idea what Charlie Tibbs had told their employers about him. He wondered if his recent doubts and complaints were being reported. Charlie could honestly say that the Old Man had recently shown more reluctance on the job. Would they relieve him if the complaints got too loud? Would they pay him off? Would they have Charlie Tibbs walk up behind him and put a bullet in the back of his head?

The Old Man had begun to question Charlie Tibbs’s sanity. One of the reasons for this was that Tibbs had recently insisted on replaying a CD of Oklahoma! over and over again while they drove. Tibbs sang along with full force. And even before Emily Betts crashed, Charlie seemed to like this job way too much. He enjoyed what they were doing. It was as if Charlie had been given the opportunity to vent a lifetime of rage, and he just got a big old kick out of it. Charlie was driven by something, and absolutely relentless. He believed in this cause even more, he said, than their employers believed in it. And he still did not sleep.

Charlie emerged from the pickup and signaled through the fence for the Old Man.

Grunting, and moving very slowly, the Old Man pulled himself out of the hot pool and trudged over to the fence where Charlie was waiting. He left wet splayed footprints on the pavement behind him. His skin had turned bright pink in the hot water. As he approached the fence, he bowed his wet head to listen.

Charlie spoke softly. “They’ve located the lawyer so we have to get going.”

“Please tell me he’s close,” the Old Man said, dreading another cross-country trip.

“Yellowstone,” Charlie said. “Very close.”

“In the park?”

Charlie nodded yes.

“Then we’re through?” the Old Man asked with hope.

“Not quite.”

The Old Man felt as if Charlie had reached through the fence and punched him in the side of the head. Charlie knew how the Old Man felt about this. He had told Charlie countless times in the last few days: he wanted this job to be over.

The Old Man shook his head. “I can’t see our luck holding out forever, Charlie. They can’t keep adding targets to the list. They just can’t.” His voice was anguished.

“Just one more after the lawyer,” Charlie said. “And please keep your voice down.”

The Old Man looked up. Charlie was staring at him coolly, evaluating him. Under this withering glare, the Old Man capitulated.

“But this will have to be the last one, Charlie. Any more, and so help me, I’ll quit. And you can tell our employers that. This is it. ” The Old Man spat out the last word.

Charlie Tibbs was silent.

“So after the lawyer where do we have to go? Who is the target?”

Charlie hesitated. The Old Man understood why. This was violating their agreement not to discuss the details of more than one job at a time. It had probably been a good idea, the Old Man conceded, since he wouldn’t have stuck with it this long if he had known in advance how elaborate and twisted their mission would become. The Old Man wished he were stronger, more sure of himself and their cause-more like Charlie.

Charlie quickly looked left and right before speaking, and then leaned closer until his hat brim touched the fence.

“Our duty isn’t to question.” Charlie bit out the words. “We don’t know the reasons these targets were chosen and that’s good. All we know is that a lot of thought has gone into this and they’ve got the whole thing figured out. We just follow orders.”

“No one’s questioning anything,” the Old Man answered, his tone deliberate. He wondered why Charlie seemed so defensive.

Charlie sized up the Old Man again, his light blue eyes raking across the Old Man’s face like talons.

“Saddlestring, Wyoming,” Charlie spoke in a voice that was barely audible over the amplified swimming pool sounds from elsewhere in the complex. “That rumor about Stewie Woods isn’t going away. Now it’s that he-or somebody pretending to be Stewie Woods-is contacting his old colleagues.”

The Old Man felt a rush of anger. “That’s not possible. You know that’s not possible.”

Charlie nodded. “It’s probably one of his hangers-on trying to get something going. But we have to check it out.”

“It’s not possible,” the Old Man said again, shaking his head, trying unsuccessfully to come up with a scenario where Woods could have walked away from that explosion.

“And there’s something else,” Charlie said. “Because this guy, whoever he is, is pretending to be Stewie Woods, the local game warden in Saddlestring is snooping around. Other law enforcement might follow. That’s heat we don’t need. So we need to squash this pretender as quickly as possible.”

“Do they have any idea who the pretender is?” the Old Man asked.

“Not yet,” Charlie answered, narrowing his eyes. “But they expect they will shortly.”

It was a month after elk-calving season in the Bighorns and Joe Pickett was doing a preliminary trend count. The purpose of the trend count was to assess how the elk had wintered, and how many babies had been born to replenish the herd. The season for calves was generally May 20 through June 30, so all of the new ones should have dropped. He rode near the tree line on his buckskin, Lizzie, looking down the slope into the meadows and brush for the elk. It was one of those rare, perfect, vibrant July mornings that pulsed with color and scent. Wildflowers were bursting open in the meadows like strings of mute fireworks, and saplings were stretching sunward after recently breaking out of the solitary confinement of the snowpack. Swollen narrow streambeds were flexing their muscles with runoff. Summer was here, and it was in a hurry.

The cow elk used the tall sagebrush just below the tree line for calving, and Joe had found seven elk cows and six month-old newborns so far. It was a good year for elk given the fairly mild winter and the moist spring. He could smell their particular musty presence even before he saw the first mother and calf. The mothers eyed him warily as he quietly rode by in the shadows of the trees. One tried to lure him away from her calf by fully exposing herself in the meadow and trotting through the open field toward the opposite rise. She stopped in clear view to look over her shoulder, and snorted when Joe rode on and didn’t pursue. Her calf looked at him through a fork in the tall brush. The calf was all eyes and ears, and Joe was close enough to see a bead of condensation on the calf’s black snout.

Joe rode deeper into the trees and further up the mountainside until the mother elk turned back to her calf. He goosed Lizzie through the timber, toward a patch of sunlight that became a small grassy park and dismounted. He tied up his horse and sat on a downed log, where he stretched out and let the sun warm his legs. Pouring a cup of coffee from his battered Thermos, he tipped up the brim of his hat and sighed. The coffee was still hot.

Joe had put off doing any serious thinking until he was in the mountains, hoping the quiet solace of the outdoors would help him find the answers he was looking for. Now, he reviewed the particularly odd chain of events that had started with Jim Finotta getting to Sandvick and Judge Pennock’s refusal to advance Joe’s charges against Finotta.